Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  The technology would work great right now for terrorists who want to remain safe at home—for bombers of abortion clinics and federal buildings and Israeli buses who want to watch their car bombs go off, to see the survivors stumble out dazed and bloody, to count the ambulances screaming in. For remote-control postattack reconnaissance, command and control for the insane, it would more than suffice.

  And soon it will empower everyone. The internet will have fulfilled its revolutionary potential. Then each of us will be omniscient, everyone a Big Brother, and all barriers transparent. For now, however, it’s like trying to race a Model A across the continent in a week—possible, but only very theoretically. The odds against Lindbergh were long, too. Such an undertaking has its own old-fashioned American mechanic’s nobility, doesn’t it? The failed attempt is preferable to the gnaw of passivity. Even the accursed victim can redeem his victimhood.

  But alas, developing nations are developing nations. The sharpest pictures, where detail can be made out, are not the sorts that get transmitted from the streets and squares of Third World cities. These on the screen now seem especially hazy, cities in the mists. And nearly all the images are panoramas or close-ups, postcard views or individual rooms and corridors, neither of which are ideal for his purposes.

  At first he is brimming with beginner’s-luck hopefulness, ready for eureka. The U.S. embassy in Jakarta is on a street called Merdeka Selatan, and then right away he finds two cams operating on Merdeka Selatan. One of them is even pointed in the right direction, with a color image clear enough to apprehend the gender of passersby. After watching sixty real-time images over four and a half hours last night (midday in Jakarta), he thought he lucked out. There was a shot of two women and three men stepping from a Mercedes in front of the embassy. He stored the image and looked closely, but it was impossible to tell.

  If she happens to step into information sciences classroom 112A at the University of Jakarta, he will have a stunningly clear picture. But he’s not mad; he knows the odds are long. Still, there are at least fourteen cams in the city, including four at the university, two at a giant shopping center called Block M, one on Merdeka Square near her hotel, and one, called the Mikrolet-Mikrolet-cam, mounted next to the driver inside a public bus. The bus image is George’s favorite, aesthetically and sociologically. (It’s possible she’ll get on a bus. She takes them in New York.) Given the rate at which fresh pictures arrive from each camera, it is easy to make the circuit among the fourteen Jakarta-cams, one after another, and never miss an image. There is a surprising comfort and solace in that. Casting into the pond is still fishing, even if you never hook a bass. He is watching her, even if he can’t see her.

  43

  Lizzie hasn’t had a cigarette since Tokyo. All the smoke in the air makes it easier to quit, aversion therapy on a massive, inescapable scale—the smokes, plural, as she has learned here. In Indonesia, seams of coal as well as trees and brush are on fire, so the smoke in Jakarta is more sulfurous than the smoke in Kuala Lumpur. On the other hand, the Jakarta smoke has a slightly sweet top note of burning peat. During dinner at the ambassador’s beach house last night, Mr. Hatta, the Indonesian deputy information minister (who’s also an army lieutenant general) portrayed “our zone of fire” as a kind of fascinating adventure-travel destination, since the coal started burning when lightning struck “at a time before your Christ.” Mr. Hatta also mentioned “some very eye-row-neek advantages of the fire,” such as endangered orangutans being driven from the forests into villages, where they’re slaughtered and eaten “by the starving peasant folk.” He agreed to put in a good word with both his cousin, who runs the national TV channel, and his wife’s brother, who runs the private HTI, Happy Televisi Indonesia, about buying MBC’s programs, including NARCS.

  They have arrived at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport. She is heading home. Whisking in self-important Mercedeses through unmarked back gates, passing armed men who stiffen and quake a little instead of scowl, Lizzie finds the VIP routine tolerable for occasional, brief, playacting stretches. It isn’t the Mose lifestyle she finds unbearable (unless Gloria Mose is defined as a lifestyle feature), it’s this business itself, big business, business that is only deal making—the deals transacted with smug, hard, murky men. She is a shopkeeper at heart, as Ben Gould says. Fine Technologies is a gemütlich $102-million shop selling notions.

  “There she is,” Saddler says as they drive onto the runway toward the Mose jet.

  “It is a lovely machine, isn’t it?” Harold says.

  The idea that she’s sleeping with Harold Mose is so off, so farfetched, that it makes her wonder about George’s judgment. Even paranoid fears ought to be in the ballpark. If she were going to have an affair, hell, she’d sooner have it with …

  She looks around the limo … at Hank Saddler reading his DHL-ed copy of Teen People … Randy, bobbing his head in time to the Garth Brooks DAT piped into his ears …

  No one here, including Harold Mose. Harold, she realizes, has become less attractive by the day. He seems a little older and homelier after his explanation of the Malaysian condolence-card business, and homelier still after he pandered to Jimmy Wong’s Jew-baiting, and tittered about the orangutans.

  During the trip, he’s revealed a dozen of his habitual fudges to her, microcrimes like “the little accounting time-travel hocus-pocus” he said they’ve pulled for years. A shell corporation in Tonga straddling the 180-degree meridian, the international date line, allows Mose Media Holdings to get away with booking big sales from the next fiscal quarter in the current quarter, in order to make current revenues look larger. And he told her about how MMH pushes hundreds of millions of dollars in “marketing costs,” especially the MBC’s, off their income statements and onto the books of various friendly Asian telephone and television companies. (“Partners,” Mose called them, and “strategic allies,” not “accomplices.”) For their trouble, the executives of the Asian companies are awarded cheap below-market Mose Media stock warrants, which they can sell for a profit. “It’s half the reason Arnold let me start an American network,” he told Lizzie. “It turns out everything in TV is a ‘marketing cost.’ ” Hearing Mose’s tangled, whispered confidences aboard the jet gives them, in Lizzie’s mind, an extra patina of darkness and slime. When she e-mailed Ben from Jakarta to get a reading on whether this cost-shuffling scheme is criminal, he replied, “It’s a fucking rig. But legal, probably.”

  Mose is confiding in Lizzie more and more, and she is afraid she understands why. When she didn’t put up a fuss over Real Time, she made her bones, proving to Mose that she is a grownup, steeped in realpolitik and focused on the main chance. She still doesn’t feel (very) guilty about not standing by her man and quitting. But she detests its implications. She hates that it makes Mose believe she’s like him.

  “Captain Sam tells me it’ll be a fifteen-hour flight to Los Angeles today,” the Cindy Crawford flight attendant says, “and I’ll be presenting some dinner ideas as soon as we’re in the air, including a fantastic fresh pork satay.”

  They are already high, rocketing northeast. Saddler has stuck in earplugs, and he’s wearing a huge, silky black sleeping mask.

  “Captain Sam wanted me to tell you that if you look out, you’ll be able to see the equator. If the equator were real. Another glazed carambola nugget, Ms. Zimbalist?” the woman says, holding a Josef Hoffmann silver tray in front of her.

  “Thank you.” No, it is not the interludes of profligate living that Lizzie minds so much.

  “I got a fax from Arnold this morning,” Mose says. “Your friends in Redmond are apparently interested in our digital portfolio. Part of a ‘strategic alliance’ with WebTV, maybe something more.” He sips his virgin gimlet. “What do you think, Elizabeth?”

  She thinks: It’s August now. She thinks: Change of control.

  44

  Alone on Water Street these last weeks, George has been extrapolating. He sees the time, not at all distant, when traffic ha
s been reduced to nothing but these friendly motorized logos. The streets will be devoted entirely to clean, efficient trucks—UPS, DefEx, DHL, FedEx. The delivery drivers will be people’s only direct contact with strangers. Life is migrating indoors quickly, so quickly, to computers and cables and phone lines. And this new economy, prosperity itself, now requires that the transformation proceed. Ten years from now, maybe twenty, the only people on the streets in any numbers will be the smokers, the homeless, and the uniformed drivers of tidy, squarish trucks. And the human drivers’ days are undoubtedly numbered.

  George signs the man’s electronic clipboard, his imaginary paper, with his imaginary FedEx pen. The package, a small one, is from C. PRIEVE in Woodside, California, and addressed by hand. He doesn’t know C. Prieve. It’s a computer disk, one of the new fat gray ones that can contain the Library of Alexandria in half the size of a Pop-Tart. A purple Post-it is stuck to the front. In very neat handwriting it says, “An outreach from your friends at Mose Media’s unofficial ‘human resources’ dept.… Your personal real-time recording of That’s No Lady, That’s My Wife! Enjoy.” He looks inside the little cardboard packet, but there’s no letter.

  Upstairs in their bedroom, he turns on her computer, slides the empty Krispy Kreme box off the Jaz drive, and inserts the mystery disk. An icon pops onto the screen, but not the regular, factory-installed picture. It is a red letter M over a bleeding heart.

  A video image appears, looking like one of the nut-cams on the web. Except the room it shows is spare and handsome. And the person on camera is Harold Mose. He’s staring at a point just below the lens. His lips are slightly parted. He’s squinting, and has a dreamy, faraway look.

  Fucking weird, George thinks. But kind of cool. He wonders who C. Prieve is.

  Then the image shakes and blurs, and for three seconds becomes unreadable, empty.

  And then Harold Mose is back on screen. The closeup has changed to a medium shot—a two-shot, in a sense, now that Mose’s penis is out of his trousers, erect, and he is masturbating. The penis is uncircumcised.

  Who is C. Prieve? And what on earth is George Mactier supposed to do with a video of Harold Mose jerking off?

  It looks like Mose is whispering, “Yes.” And he has started an involuntary sort of Bob Fosse hip thrust that George finds extremely embarrassing to watch. He can’t not watch, of course.

  A line of type appears, moving from right to left across the bottom of the screen. HI! IT’S ME, ELIZABETH, it says.

  He is hallucinating. He’s been inside his own sweaty, malignant head too long.

  But then he sees Mose whisper, “Hello, Elizabeth.”

  He is not hallucinating. Or if he is, George knows, it’s some kind of full-on psychotic break, and he’d better call 911. He keeps watching.

  More type speeds across the screen. OKAY, YOU CAN JUST WATCH WHILE SOME OF MY OTHER HOT FRIENDS ASK ME TO PUT ON A NASTY SHOW FOR THEM … YOU WANT ME TO FINGER MY HOT JUICY CUNT? … SHOULD I DO IT LIKE THIS?

  There’s a pause in the type. But Mose continues. George can now hear Mose’s shallow, accelerating little intakes of breath, and, he thinks, a few grunted yeahs.

  Mose disappears. MMMMMMMMM! YES, SIR!! Then the recording goes black.

  C. Prieve must be one scurvy creep.

  George is disgusted and appalled.

  But he’s also grateful. Because now there isn’t any question. This is what he was after, wasn’t it, with the Jakarta cams?

  C. Prieve may be a scurvy creep, he thinks, but he’s my scurvy creep.

  He clicks on the bar beneath the image, and slides the little button almost back to the beginning. He finds the frame with the words, HI! IT’S ME, ELIZABETH! and clicks to start playing it again.

  He’s been up all night, but he feels fantastic, entirely calm and clearheaded for the first time in weeks. He feels light and clean, revived, purged of doubt. The last time he stayed up all night like this was at Newsweek, crashing a cover story on … well, he doesn’t recall the story now, probably Reagan and SDI, “Star Wars.” It was exciting like this is exciting, the same missionary sense of digging, reporting, analyzing, making sense of a sprawl of facts—piecing together the truth—all by himself on a tight deadline.

  It’s interesting, he thinks, how he loathed reporting, the phoning of wary strangers to intrude on their dinners or their business or their grief, play on their vanities or anger or righteousness or whatever it took to get in and get over. Back in the eighties, none of this technology existed.

  Lizzie said, whenever that was, days ago, that she’s returning home on Saturday. But is she flying straight to New York? She didn’t say. What time exactly, and which airport? She didn’t say.

  But George knows. George knows because he’s been on a reporting bender since yesterday afternoon, nonstop. He dug out those snapshots Max took last winter of the jet, when the whole family flew to Minnesota for Edith Hope’s funeral. Bingo: Mose Media Holdings’ green Bombardier with its tail number visible, precisely the datum he needed to type into his favorite new web site. Now he knows what the FAA knows: it took off from Soekarno-Hatta International Airport at four fifty-one P.M., Jakarta time, eleven minutes late. He knows it’s scheduled to land in Los Angeles tonight at eight P.M. He knows it’s scheduled to land tomorrow afternoon in Teterboro at four P.M. sharp. He knows how many pounds of aviation fuel they’re carrying. He knows the names of the pilots, Sam and Jerry. He knows the names of the passengers. (Who is Randy McCarthy? What does the G in Henry G. Saddler stand for?) He knows everything.

  He stares at Max’s snapshot of the jet, imagining Mose and Lizzie naked inside. Maybe Randy pairs off with Gloria. What about Saddler? Okay, you can just watch while some of my other hot friends ask me to put on a nasty show for them. He remembers Saddler droning on about the avionics when they flew to Minneapolis, explaining how flight plans are digitized and loaded onto an onboard computer. It can even be done wirelessly, Hank said, from a remote location. George stares at the photo. He wonders if somebody like Fanny Taft could hack into the jet’s system and force it to land. Remote-controlled hijacking! Or force it to crash.

  Fanny Taft’s number isn’t on Lizzie’s computer address database. He calls Jodie Taft in Edina, and asks if she has Fanny’s number for the summer in Brooklyn. Jodie sounds flummoxed by the call at first. But then she is so pleased that George is going to invite Fanny over for dinner and make sure she’s doing okay, and then, Jodie-ishly, so Jodie-ishly, wants to chat, and asks him if Real Time has been moved to a new time slot, and says she thinks Jess, the gay one, seems sharp as a tack, and he tells her thanks, but he has to get back to work, even though it’s Saturday.

  He gets Fanny, who just this minute walked in, back from Def Con.

  “What’s Def Con?”

  “It’s this gathering of hackers from all over,” she says. “I mean, wizards. They were like, ‘Let me show you how to do this, and this, and this.’ It happens once a year. It’s insane. Really awesome.”

  “Well,” George tells her, “that’s perfect, because the reason I called is that I need to pick your brain, if I can. I’m working on a project about computer security and things like that. Big Brother kinds of stuff.”

  “Like for a new show or something?”

  “It could become a show.”

  “Cool. I should bring Willi, one of the German guys from Fine Tech. He is an awesome hacker.”

  And so Fanny and Willibald will be over for dinner tonight.

  George spends most of the rest of the afternoon cleaning up, although he wonders if the havoc and trash might be a good thing, Daddy, to a goateed German hacker and a seventeen-year-old computer criminal. Fanny and Willi might think a sleepless, unshaven man alone in a house strewn with two weeks of old magazines and newspapers and piles of empty tuna cans and pink-lemonade jugs and celery ends and cookie-dough wrappers and Krispy Kreme boxes is, you know, cool.

  But he takes a shower, goes grocery shopping for the first time in calendar
year 2000, buys wine, and prepares a real dinner.

  Willibald was completely uninterested in George’s time as a reporter in Bonn in the eighties. As soon as he tells him that he lost his hand in a contra mortar attack on his Sandinista jeep in Nicaragua during the counterrevolution, however, Willi becomes his comrade, and calls the cancellation of Real Time “a Kulturkampf.”

  “You know,” Fanny says, “information does want to be free. No joke. What do you want to know?”

  They tell him how they can read anything on almost anybody’s computer anywhere on earth from anywhere else on earth. If a target (Willi’s word) visits a web site that they’ve hacked or control, they can read the target’s cookies.

  “ ‘Cookies’?” George asks.

  “Such a newbie,” Fanny says. “It’s kind of amazing you’re married to Lizzie.”

  And so they explain how the cookies on somebody’s web browser are a record of what he does in cyberspace, what he buys, which computer he uses at his company, who he is.

  “Do the cookies keep records of e-mail?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” George says, “let’s say I want to read all the e-mails that an executive of some software company is writing and getting at home—a guy at Microsoft, let’s say.”